Business meetings are a frequent and necessary occurrence within a business or corporation. They serve as a platform to express ideas, concerns, strategy, current news or status updates. Oftentimes, the business meeting is the only forum for which persons from separate business divisions or departments are in the same location free discuss a variety of subjects. Such business meetings, although necessary, do cost the corporation or individual departments. An employee's attendance at a business meeting is valuable because of the information acquired, but also time spent at the given meeting. An employee's attendance at a business meeting financially costs the business in terms of lost time and lost productivity. An employee's cost of attendance at a particular meeting may be based on that person's pay scale, hourly fee, lost production or overall compensation. An employee's particular business unit within the corporation determines the employee's cost and bears the financial burden of that employee's attendance at the meeting. Businesses and corporations must determine if holding a business meeting will add real value to the company or if the potential benefits from the meeting outweighed by the cost to the individual business divisions.
Prior art discloses means for monitoring the cost of particular meetings, but do not report the cost to individual business units within the company. In large meetings, the overall cost of the meeting is of minimal importance because such dollar amounts have no link to a particular department budget, thus no way to show who or where the money is being spent. A need exists for an automatic, convenient means to monitor and record the individuals in attendance at a particular business meeting and what the cost to each individual business department is as a result of the individual's attendance at the given meeting.